The 27-year-old landscaper, who does not have health insurance, left a $1,000-a-month apartment in Palm Beach Gardens and moved his family into a $4,000 trailer at the Meadowbrook Mobile Home Park near Okeechobee Boulevard and Florida's Turnpike. His monthly rent: $321.

Five days later, the park's nearly 500 homeowners -- many poor or disabled -- received a letter from a relocation service hired by Centex Homes informing them that the builder had a contract to buy the 83-acre park and put up 618 townhouses.

Residents could be forced to leave within 18 months if the county grants zoning approvals for the project.

But moving will not be an option for residents living in decades-old trailers that are no longer mobile. In Cisneros' case, he said he couldn't afford to pay the movers even if he could find another park willing to accept his 20-year-old singlewide trailer.

A new Department of Motor Vehicle restriction issued this month would restrict relocating trailers built before 1994 because they do not meet modern safety requirements. A DMV spokesman said the restrictions are now under review.

"It's hard," Cisneros said, standing in the dark outside the trailer, which has not had power since Hurricane Jeanne a month ago. "I bought this trailer because I didn't have another way to go. I'm losing hope."

County Commissioner Jeff Koons said the county's affordable-housing shortage is so critical that he's going to recommend turning down Centex Homes' rezoning application.

Koons wants the county to get serious about creating housing options for the poor. He suggested exploring whether to buy mobile home parks to protect them from developers. Trailer parks are increasingly attractive to developers because they often sit on valuable land, close to highways and beaches.

"The fundamental problem is that there's no place for those people to move to," Koons said. "Palm Beach County staff is facing another example of a lack of attainable housing that was exasperated by hurricanes."

Aimee Craig Carlson, director of land entitlement for Centex, said a company study shows 400 vacant trailer lots and 600 vacant trailers are available in a 10-square-mile radius of the park. About 2,000 vacant apartments are also in the area, she said.

The company hired a relocation company to help residents find new homes. The company held a daylong meeting with residents Oct. 13 to answer questions, she said.

Carlson said she hopes some of the residents will move into the new townhouses, which are meant to be "attainable housing." Although the prices have not been finalized, Carlson estimated that the homes would start in the high $100,000s.

"We are local homebuilders. We live here," Carlson said. "We will do anything we can do to make it as stress-free as possible for the residents."

Still reeling from the hurricanes, a few residents mobilized shortly after receiving the Oct. 6 notification. They collected $1,500 to hire an attorney and have nearly garnered enough signatures to form a homeowners association, resident Joan Catroppa said.

Florida law requires a trailer park owner to give residents the first chance to buy the property as long as they have a registered homeowners association. The residents then have 45 days to match the developer's offer. Because the residents haven't formed an association, they weren't told the offer price.

"We survived two hurricanes, and then we got this beautiful letter," Catroppa said. "We feel we have no control of our lives. We've had three things that we couldn't control. It hurts."

Organizers Vivian Clarke and Carlos Sosa said many of the residents are laborers from South and Central America who don't speak English and are instinctively skeptical of the petition drive. But they have succeeded in collecting 187 signatures -- 63 short of the goal.

"They're counting on the fact that we're low-income and unorganized," Clarke said. "They think that we can't work together."

It would likely cost Cisneros more to move his trailer than it did to buy it. To move a trailer and set it up costs about $8,000, said Bill Gentry, owner of B&C; Mobile Homes in Davie. It costs about $12,000 to relocate a doublewide, he said.

The move would be subsidized. Mobile home owners receive $3,000 from the state for moving a singlewide home and $6,000 for a doublewide home if they are forced to move because of a land-use change. Residents who abandon their singlewide homes can collect about $1,300 and twice as much for the wider trailers.

"I think you've got to look at the number of people displaced and whether or not there's alternative housing for them," said Delray Beach attorney Carl Cascio, who represents the residents. "If there isn't, the county's got to look at that ... They should not be allowing them to be forced out literally on the street. And that's what's going to happen to some of them."

Prashant Gopal can be reached at pgopal@sun-sentinel.com or 954-555-4000.